Workshop on Conversational Applications
— Use Cases and Requirements for New Models of Human Language to Support Mobile
Conversational Systems —

18-19 June 2010

Hosted by Openstream, Somerset, NJ, US

A number of developers of conversational voice applications feel that the
model of human language currently supported by W3C standards such as SRGS, SISR
and PLS is not adequate and that developers need new capabilities in order to
support more sophisticated conversational applications.

The goal of the workshop is to understand the limitations of the current W3C
language model in order to develop a more comprehensive model. We plan to
collect and analyze use cases and prioritize requirements that ultimately will
be used to identify improvements to the W3C language model. Just as W3C
developed SSML 1.1 to broaden the languages for which SSML is useful, this
effort will result in improved support for language capabilities that are
unsupported today.

The main outcome of the workshop will be the publication of a document that
will serve as a guide for improving the W3C language model.

Position papers will be the basis for the discussions at the workshop.
Individuals wishing to participate must submit a position paper by the date
shown below. The program committee will select papers that provide insight into
the requirements and use cases for improving the W3C language model.

Position papers must be written in English. Examples may be illustrated with
non-English languages with an English explanation. All papers should be 1 to 5
pages, although they may link to longer versions or appendices. Allowed formats
are valid HTML or XHTML, PDF, or plain text. Papers in any other format
(including invalid HTML/XHTML) will be returned with a request for correct
formatting.

Participation in the workshop is conditional upon acceptance of the position
paper by the program committee.

Accepted position papers will be published on the public Web page of the
workshop. Submitting a position paper comprises a default recognition of these
terms for publication.

The Program Committee will ask the authors of particularly salient position
papers to explicitly present their position at the workshop to foster
discussion. Presenters will be asked to make the slides of the presentation
available on the workshop home page in HTML, PDF, or plain text.

See the schedule below for submission and registration deadlines.

Topics:

Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following:

Use cases and requirements for grammar formalisms more powerful than
SRGS's context free grammars that are needed to implement tomorrow's
applications

What are the common aspects of human language models for different
languages that can be factored into reusable modules?

Use cases and requirements for realigning/extending SRGS, PLS and SISR to
support more powerful human language models

Use cases and requirements for sharing grammars among concurrent
applications

Use cases that illustrate requirements for natural language capabilities
for conversational dialog systems that cannot easily be implemented using
the current W3C conversational language model.

Use cases and requirements for speech-enabled applications that can be
used across multiple languages (English, German, Spanish, ...) with only
minor modifications.

Use cases and requirements for composing the behaviors of multiple
speech-enabled applications that were developed independently without
requiring changes to the applications.

Use cases and requirements motivating the need to resolve ellipses and
anaphoric references to previous utterances.

Participation:

Participation will be governed by the following:

To ensure maximum diversity, the number of participants per organization
will be limited.